Labour MP Douglas Alexander: Scotland's tech-savvy first-time voters will reject independence as they understand the value of being connected

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS will get the vote for the first time when Scotland decides on independence in September. Here, Shadow Foreign Secretary and Labour election strategist Douglas Alexander - ahead of a speech to a Better Together rally in Glasgow today - suggests Scotland's tech-savvy teenagers want wider horizons, not new borders.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Nationalist strategists have long believed that giving votes to 16-year-olds was a masterstroke that could tip the balance and ensure a separatist victory.

Why did they get it so wrong? Was it just a case of believing their own hype? In fact, I think they’ve mis-understood something deeper about our young people.

The Scottish Government assumed that today’s young Scots are the “Nationalist Generation”. It turns out that today’s young Scots are the “Network Generation”. Those Scottish Millenials – born in the years just before 2000 – are children of the digital age.

This Network Generation have grown up in a connected world. With Skype, Facebook, Twitter and the internet, the world is at their fingertips via their smart phone. They find the idea of watching TV programmes at a time to suit the broadcaster quaint and old-fashioned.

Control, connection and cooperation are the Network Generation’s watchwords. They believe they can, and should, have it all. Indeed, the science of networks teaches us that the more connected you are, the more powerful you are. Our young people get that. It’s how they live their lives.

The Network Generation are secure in, and proud of, their Scottishness. Unlike my generation that grew up in the 80s, they don’t see our sense of identity as under threat.

Margaret Thatcher is, for them, only another name from history. A 16-year-old voting for the first time on September 18 will have lived three-quarters of their life with a UK Labour government. They have only ever known Scotland with a parliament in its capital.

The Network Generation have grown up watching Barcelona and Manchester United as much as Rangers or Celtic. They’ll support Europe in the Ryder Cup and Scotland in the Commonwealth Games this summer as ardently as they supported Team GB in 2012.

As times change, so do the way each generation see the world. It is rather like the way our generation came to see our grandparents’ views on the Empire and colonies as outdated.

If you’re part of the Network Generation, you don’t have to belong just to one nation. Dual identities come easily to these dual screeners. They fear a separate Scotland would be a narrowing, not a broadening, experience. And they see the forced binary choice of Scotland or the UK as last-century, not this-century, thinking. This Network Generation are much less interested in past grievances than future possibilities.

The Network Generation understand that what’s at stake is not just 300 years of shared history but a quintessentially modern idea that on these small, rainy islands we can succeed as a multi-ethnic, multicultural, multinational country together.

Like so many, they may feel there’s nowhere better than Scotland but they understand there’s something bigger. And they want the opportunities which come from being connected to something bigger.

The polls show consistently that the Network Generation recognise that they and future generations have the most to gain from remaining part of the UK and the most to lose from walking away.

They have grown up in a world of instant connection and communication where the old polarities of the politicians just seem dated. I believe that’s good news for Scotland’s future.

We have heard and will hear a lot about the “historic choice” Scotland faces on September 18. What these young people remind us is that what’s at stake is not our history but our future – and how Scotland succeeds in this changing world. It’s the Network Generation showing us the way.

Their outlook matters because how we engage with difference is one of the most vital questions our nation and our world faces.

In today and tomorrow’s connected, crowded and interconnected world, we can’t escape each other. So we need to learn better ways to live together.

Whether we treat difference with empathy and respect or view the “other” as outsiders to be regarded with incomprehension or fear really matters. It matters because, far beyond Scotland, the world is getting ever more interconnected. Driven by networks, communication in the 21st century doesn’t know any borders. Neither does trade. Neither does terrorism. Neither does the atmosphere.

It’s becoming clearer that all of our main problems can only be tackled, and our opportunities realised, by people broadening rather than narrowing their perspective and then working together, not walking away.

It was almost 50 years ago that Robert F Kennedy challenged an audience of students in apartheid South Africa with these words: “This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.”

That challenge endures today. And with their global perspective, I believe Scotland’s Network Generation stand ready to help answer that call.

That’s good news for Scotland, for the UK and for our global community.